Posted on 06/29/2021 5:15:45 PM PDT by CharlesOConnell
"Mom, Joe and I have decided to live together," my strong-willed 23-year-old daughter announced defiantly at our dining-room table, her boyfriend at her side.
Her words made my heart pound and my stomach churn. "Have either of you even thought about the possibility you could get pregnant?"
My daughter looked sheepishly at her boyfriend, admitting they hadn't. The defiance swept over her face again and she replied, "Well, I don't care what you and Dad think. You'll just have to accept it."
"We may have to tolerate it," I said firmly. "But we'll never accept it. You're going, against every value taught you."
As she and her 24-year-old boyfriend marched out the door, I was heartbroken. It was one of the great sorrows of my life.
I couldn't convince my daughter that by entering a relationship of sex without marriage she could be making the worst mistake of her life. But since then I've learned unsettling facts about cohabitation. My hope is that what I learned will help other young people and parents facing the same situation. (The U.S. Census Bureau says 6,085,284 unmarried, opposite-sex partners live together. [Written in 1994]) Here's what I found:
Estimates from a number of experts are that 40 to 50 percent of cohabitants never marry each other. One 1985 Columbia University study found only 19 percent of men who lived with their girlfriends eventually walked down the aisle with them.
I also learned that in many live-in relationship differently, frequently the result of failing to discuss what they expect of each other. When 139 cohabiting students were asked why they lived with' somebody, most women said it was a first step toward marriage. For men, the most common motive was sex. One man, asked why he was living with his girlfriend, replied, "Sex-when you want it, where you want it Though that particular inquiry is now years old, and the fear of AIDS has changed attitudes toward sex, I found from the people I've talked to that many cohabitants still don't talk about what they expect from living together.
Many young couples today insist that living Together Is a good idea, the best way to see if they are compatible-and hence the best way to prevent divorce. The truth? One study found that people who live together before marriage are about 33 percent more likely to split up than those who don't. Another study showed that the longer they live together before marriage, the more likely they themselves thought their chance of divorce. Moreover, the study says, cohabitants have a lower reported quality of marriage and a lower commitment to it.
As Connecticut psychologist Joseph Nowinski explains, "Living together, while frequently touted as an intensely bold, romantic move, is often really a way to avoid full commitment. When two people opt for living together over marriage, one or both of them are often secretly saying, I'm worried my love for you is too fragile to last a lifetime, So I want a quick escape hatch if the going gets rough'. "
A broken heart can't be prevented just by refusing to sign on the dotted line. When live-in couples split, the emotional fallout is often as deeply painful as divorce. University of Southern California clinical psychologist Michael Newcomb explains: "Live-in couples usually become as emotionally attached as married couples. The problem is, it is easier for even a small problem to drive them apart because they just don't have the glue that married couples do to hold them together-such as kids, shared finances, a legal document."
Steve Jaccarino, a contractor in Westport, Conn., and his girlfriend broke up mainly because they disagreed over where they wanted to settle. Today, ten years later, Steve still imagines her coming back into his life. "I'm not over her," he says.
This was one of my deepest concerns. Five years before my daughter announced she was going to live with her boyfriend, she had made the same mistake. At age 18, she had run away from home to live with another boy-and bad gotten pregnant. When he deserted her, my daughter was so devastated and unable to cope that for years the burden of raising the baby had fallen on my husband's and my shoulders.
When another young woman I know of lived with a man, she accidentally got pregnant with twins. Her live-in lover stayed with her until she was seven months along and jobless, then phoned her parents one night and announced, "Come and get your very pregnant daughter." For the next 18 years, she raised her twin boys alone, often barely able to buy food or pay rent. Fully 44 percent of unwed mothers will live in poverty.
Frequently, people who live together first are miserable after marriage. Common problems include: lower overall ability to communicate-less ability to resolve quarrels. In one study, wives who' cohabited before the wedding complained especially about the poor quality of communication with their mates. Clearly, when it comes to marriage, practicing beforehand doesn't make perfect. On the contrary, in a study reported in the Journal of Marriage and the Family, the longer couples had lived together before marriage, the more unhappy they were.
A 1989 study found physical attacks are more common and more severe among live-in couples than among those who are married. Isolation from their families may be a reason for this, the study's authors concluded.
Another survey showed a startling 40 per cent of cohabiting women were forced to endure a kind of sex they disliked. Moreover, since there is often no commitment to be sexually exclusive, those who cohabit may be put at a higher-than-average risk for sexually transmitted diseases such as genital herpes, chlamydia and AIDS.
At age 19, one Palm Springs, California woman offered to let her unemployed boyfriend-move in with her. She recalls: "He was living with his ex-girlfriend at the time. I figured if he moved in with me, he'd be all mine. Instead, I wound up doing all the work and paying all the bills while he was secretly sleeping with her in my bed. It was a bad mistake."
Cohabiting is often portrayed as trouble-free and offering all the joys of marriage with none of the responsibilities. Nonsense!
One young man I know attests to the falsity of this argument. He moved in with his fiancee three months before their wedding. Today he says, "We had all the disagreements of marriage Who does the dishes? Who pays the bills?-without the commitment to hold us together. If we had lived together longer, we might have broken up. When you aren't married and you fight, you don't ever have to work it out if you don't want to. You can just walk away."
Frequently, the woman sees living together as romantic, while the man views the arrangement as a "practical" solution that will help them iron out differences and strengthen their love by destroying any foolish romantic fantasies they may have about each other. In fact, live-in couples may find it harder to build lasting love precisely because they have lost their starry-eyed, romantic "illusions."
Family therapists Judy and Jim Sellner, authors of Loving for Life, say that rich, lasting love goes through several distinct stages. The first is the "romantic" phase when love is wild and idealistic, when couples believe they have found their "one true love" with whom they will "live happily ever after."
It is an absolutely wonderful time, and couples should linger over it and just enjoy the candlelight dinners, the swooning, the craziness of it all. Cutting it short to rush into living together could be a major mistake. Say the Sellners: Couples who weather the tumultuous power-struggle and conflict stages and sail smoothly on to a more peaceful period in which they understand and handle their differences are those whom manage to recall the "overly idealized" visions of each other they enjoyed in the first romantic stage of courtship.
The day my daughter said she was moving in with her boyfriend, I knew some of these facts and shared them with her-to no avail. But over the past few years, as I continued to learn about the data on living together, I was even more convinced it was the wrong thing to do. I became so determined to get this information out to people-and to help young women and men avoid or cope with the pregnancies that all too often result from living together-that I started a support group for unwed parents, which advocates premarital abstinence. My daughter, now 35 and much wiser, is active in the organization and tells anyone who will listen that living together is absolutely the wrong way to go.
As our children become young adults, we can no longer make decisions for them. Nor can we completely keep them from harm. But at least we can arm them with all the facts we can find. We can then only pray they'll make the right choices.
But research shows there is a “marriage premium” for men that includes:
• A financial return that includes higher earnings, more assets and more job stability. Married men make about $16,000 more than their single peers with otherwise similar backgrounds.
• Better sex lives compared to both single and cohabiting men. According to data from the National Health and Social Life Survey, 51 percent of married men reported they were extremely emotionally satisfied with sex, compared to 39 percent of cohabiting men and 36 percent of single men.
• Longer lives. Men who get and stay married live almost 10 years longer than their unmarried peers. Also, young married men are about twice as happy: 43 percent of married men report they are “very happy” with life, compared to 20 percent of single men and 24 percent of cohabiting men.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170207135943.htm
May you remain going strong for your lifetimes :-)
Most courts do a very good job of splitting up the assets fairly between the woman and her lawyer. Was there any other party who is supposed to get any of the assets?
And then there are the liabilities. Guess which party gets those.
You didn’t mention how government is a huge partner in marriages, especially the Family Courts. That’s just the way the world works in the 21st century.
So men shouldn’t marry.
I se what you are doing and so does everyone else.
You arent interested in actual discussion. You are interested in geting any information you think will help in your attempt to invalidate my ability to speak on the topic.
So maybe just stop that. We all see it. And i am not going to reward you for it.
“....43 percent of married men report they are “very happy” with life...”
The other 57 percent hung themselves.😎
LOL — I always liked that song, but to be honest I did not realize that lyric was in it.
Whatever SAM's story is... Bet I've heard worse from some women.
One of the worst was a woman with terminal cancer. She said she was the breadwinner in the family. She loved and trusted her husband, so his name was on everything. After she was diagnosed, he emptied all the accounts, including the kids' college funds, and took off with another woman.
Meanness, evil and greed have no sexual identification.
Some men are just as bad as some women are.
You havent heard enough stories.
Plenty of women do the same when the man gets sick. They toss him in a cheap nursing home and then take everything and leave.
It happens more than you think and its hardly one sided. In any case its sickening behavior.
So, what do you do for sex?
Even if Secret Agent Man had a terrible divorce, it doesn’t make his statement less true. Young men live in an era of free milk. Set aside religion/morality for a moment. Why should a man get married? Why should he pay for what some woman had been giving away free to other men? If you think there are many virgin brides walking down the aisle you’re kidding yourself.
What exactly does marriage offer a man that single life does not? All I can think of is the family/children/leaving a legacy angle. That’s nice. But it’s also risky. Because society and other women are screaming at wives saying, you deserve more. And any moment a wife can give her husband the I’M NOT HAPPY EXCUSE and end the marriage. 70% of divorces are initiated by women.
Homework wont help.
It wont save him. It might reduce the risks. It wont get rid of any of them, and it wont give him back any of the benefits of marriage that have been taken away from men over time.
I take back what I wrote earlier because I don’t have any good data on this.
What I do know is that Marriage in the 2020s has evolved a lot over the past 60 years in the USA and possibly other countries. No matter what anyone thinks of the institution of Marriage its a legal construct with benefits, responsibilities, and liabilities for those who enter it where their individual life/responsibilities become partially the property of their partner and also for those involved in the system. Same goes for the processes involved with having children where Age 18 (and in some jurisdictions this gets extended out much longer partially or widely) is a boundary where the lives of the parents are managed heavily by the system until they get past that milestone.
In order to have honest dialogue on this topic I think a few considerations are in order.
(1) Honestly address the benefits of marriage for men and women.
(2) Honestly address the liabilities of marriage for men and women.
(3) Look at the data carefully, in particular on what happens in case of divorce with who gets assets, liabilities, spousal support, parent time, how much of the income, responsibility for attorneys fees, and more.
(4) International considerations - we live in the Internet era and jet plane flights are a lot less costly than they were in the past. No longer do men and women have a limited dating pool. Its literally hundreds of millions of men/women in the market and the laws of supply/demand are at work.
(5) Post-Divorce Effective Tax Rates - do the math on why so many become “deadbeat”.
The bottom line is that Marriage is a contractual relationship which requires a huge amount of TRUST for people to enter if they are well-informed.
Do you think sex is worth all the risk for men? You have no idea what the risks are for men, given you are a woman.
Its funny you shift the focus on sex.
Yeah, had an ex that tried to come after me years later when unpaid taxes were due.
Successfully pointed out to the IRS that she had retained all tax records, and that the divorce settlement clearly spelled that I was not responsible for anything like what she was trying pull.
After stealing thousands from me with here sneaky bank transactions that I had no idea about, then to come trying to pry a few more thousand left me with a permanent bias against her culture.
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